Just two days remained before Jesus would go to the cross.

It was Wednesday. Matthew 26 is riveting in its pathos:

When Jesus had finished all these sayings, he said to his disciples, “You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified.”

Then the chief priests and the elders of the people gathered in the palace of the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas, and plotted together in order to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him. But they said, “Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar among the people. (Mt 26:1-5, ESV)

Historical Context: Jesus taught in the temple for days: “And every day he was teaching in the temple, but at night he went out and lodged on the mount called Olivet. And early in the morning all the people came to him in the temple to hear him” (Lk 21:37-38, ESV).

People recognized that no one taught like this. Jesus’ authority was clearly superior to the false religious leaders of the corrupt system of his day. That’s why the entrenched system of self-serving religious hypocrites hated Jesus; he (Christ) called their bluff. He saw through them, and they hated him for that reality.

And yet Christ would die for the ungodly.

The chief priests and the elders, Matthew writes, “plotted together in order to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him” (Mt 26:4, ESV). Catch that? By stealth. Secretive schemers. Conniving murderers. The innocent Lamb of God was being betrayed, framed, and subjected to a bogus arrest and mock trial, and it was all unfolding per the direct sovereign hand of God.

As Peter says it, “this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23, ESV).

In other words, God used the evil of men to bring about the redemption of all who repent and believe upon Christ. The men are responsible for their choices, their evil. And yet God would use it all to redeem a particular people for himself.

In two days, Jesus would carry his cross as far as he was humanly able, until another had to help him. He had been beaten and scourged so profoundly, he was the flayed suffering servant. And yet he would complete his mission. The cross was still ahead for him.

The Last Supper was coming. And Jesus praying in Gethsemane was closer now. And of course Judas’ ultimate betrayal of the holy.

This–all of it–fulfilled in precise detail, just as was prophesied and written.